Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX
On Mit, 31 Jan 2007, Frank Küster wrote:
> I'm not sure what your opinion is: I read the beginning of your post as
> "everything is fine already", but in the end you seem to agree that
> changing the system-wide geometry.cfg is good?
I am for adapting geometry.cfg
> > I don't think so! It is only that geometry.sty detects pdftex and
> > activates this feature. Well, in this sense it is useless ;-)
>
> What do you think is the use of pdftex? What would be different without
> it?
I don't know the internals, but probably geometry.sty will not set
\pdfpageheight and \pdfpagewidht (or however they are called) and so the
final pdf file will have A4 (or whatever is default).
> If we agree that dvips is a sane default for >90% of the users (and for
> sure it is, if we add those who never use DVI mode), then I think we
> should set this default, and not just document it.
Ok. Agreed upon.
> > /usr/share/texmf-texlive/....
> > or do we put a file into
> > /etc/texmf/...
> > I would prefer the FIRST option to change the system wide geometry.cfg
> > and inform the users that they can override these defaults ...
>
> The first option IMHO violates the Debian policy. If we use
Not agreed upon. We already have a *LOT* of .cfg files in the texmf
trees. And as stated in the Debian-TeX policy *every* input file can
change *anything*.
geometry.cfg does not change the behaviour of a *program* ...
What about color.cfg, latexdoc.cfg or however all of them are called.
No. I am for changing the code in
/usr/share/texmf-texlive/...
Why:
- it is a sane default and does *NOT* change the behaviour in any bad
way
- it can be overriden on a per-document basis and on a per-system basis.
Best wishes
Norbert
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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> Università di Siena
Debian Developer <preining@debian.org> Debian TeX Group
gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094 fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76 A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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